A business process is multi-task in nature, and the information needs of users during the business process constantly vary with tasks and circumstances. The information contents that can satisfy the dynamic information needs often come from multiple sources in multiple formats. The common activities of information processing in business processes, such as accessing, viewing, composing, navigating, and analyzing these diverse information contents, are typically labor-intensive and time-consuming. For example, composing a business email can include multiple tasks with different information needs, such as finding the email addresses of the recipients, determining the subject, filling in the text body, locating relevant references that are referenced in the body of the email, and attaching proper documents. Different information formats and sources are required to satisfy the information needs of different tasks. Further adding to the complexity is that even for the same task, different information contents are often needed under different circumstances. Manually gathering the required information contents and integrating them for each of the many tasks during the business process requires significant human effort.
Some software systems tackle the above problem by providing content assistance to users for specific tasks in specific domains. Examples include active delivery of task-specific knowledge, automatic generation of reports, emails, or records, intelligent meeting scheduling, automatic form filling and phrase/sentence auto-completion. These systems focus on developing techniques that are tailored to pre-determined information needs in well-defined tasks. Thus, no dynamic learning and adaptation take place, and it is difficult to generalize them to address other information needs in different applications.
Other software systems provide content assistance by proactively retrieving and recommending “just-in-time” information in dynamic context. Information retrieval techniques are used to extract terms from context to formulate queries for retrieving documents. These systems usually do not take into account the characteristics of specific tasks and information needs. As a result, content assistance is mostly in the form of documents, which may function well in reminding or serendipitous discovery, but often do not directly address the specific information needs for the task at hand.
Given the above limitations of existing systems, what is needed for information processing in business processes is a system that provides content assistance to satisfy various types of information needs for targeted tasks in dynamic context, and methods that are applicable to content assistance in multiple domains and applications.